Bridges Over the Sea
by Jusrecht
Summary: Gino tries to understand Suzaku with his own impulsive ways, and gets more than he asks. Gino/Suzaku


**Bridges Over The Sea  
Author: Jusrecht**

**Pairing: **Gino/Suzaku

**Warnings: **SPOILERS for Turn 05 of R2. Also beware of cheesiness, corniness, fluffiness, and every other thing out there that makes your teeth ache. Blame Gino.

**Disclaimer: **Code GEASS belongs to Sunrise

**Summary: **Gino tries to understand Suzaku with his own impulsive ways, and gets more than he asks.

**A/N: **For everyone else who has also fallen victim to Sunrise's barrage of fanservice.

**--**

It was a little over ten when Gino finally left the party, and almost eleven when he found himself standing in front of the front door of the knights's living quarters. A jaunty tune on his lips, lazy fingers fumbled around in his pockets for a card key which Anya had given him not an hour earlier. The search was concluded after a few minutes and plenty of threatening the elusive object, and only then did he realize that doorbells had in fact been invented in the medieval and continued to be a useful instrument in this day and age – as long as its existence and thus purpose was properly noticed.

Sighing, he shook his head at his own foolishness as the door opened without a sound. The light was on inside, a pale, almost sickly glow in an environment predominantly ruled by white. It was the atmosphere though, wrapped in seven kinds of silence from mournful to dead to downright enigmatic, which left Gino brimming with disapproval. This wouldn't do at all. Certainly not with him in the picture.

All they needed was a little song, and so he cheerfully crushed the rank of silence, bits and pieces littering the floor as his voice rose along with it. A loud and happy song which made Arthur jump from his peaceful curling on the couch and snarl at him. And then a door opened and out came Anya to throw an alarm clock and several other pointy objects at this impudent disturber of peace before it slammed shut again with an earth-shattering quake.

Gino would have grinned if he hadn't quickly realized the absence of one reaction – _the _scowl. Eyeing the door to Suzaku's room, he contemplated his options and likelihood to lose a few limbs in a foray to an uncharted jungle. Two seconds later found him determinedly marching toward the door.

The hinges made a quiet sigh as they yielded to his light shove. It was darker inside Suzaku's room. Still in his school uniform, the younger knight was curled on his bed, facing away from the door. Gino didn't bother to wonder what it was about the posture which disturbed him and opted to approach the bed straight away.

"Suzaku?"

There was no answer. He reached down to touch the boy's shoulder but the muscles tensed and his hand had been batted away before it could even make contact with any part of Suzaku's body – or uniform, in that matter.

"Don't," the other knight hissed, face still hidden under the fold of his left arm. Gino looked down at his rejected hand and once more consulted his option menu, complete with an appendix of worst-case scenarios. Hesitation was by now an unfamiliar feeling and he chose the topmost item, which was always about following the first thing that came to mind.

He could feel Suzaku stiffening when he climbed into the bed and put his arms around the smaller body. It was wound up tight, like a coil of copper wire too long since hammered into rigid perfection. Gino understood sadness, but Suzaku was a mosaic piece that never fit in his picture of understanding. Sometimes he thought that it was because the boy was a broken piece, incomplete, his edges eroded, wrecked, crusted by rust. Other times, he thought that it was because he never belonged in that picture in the first place.

Gino couldn't decide which was better.

"You never listen to me," Suzaku said and there was so much venom in his voice that Gino almost pulled away. His second impulse was to point out that the other knight had made no visible effort to leave his circle of arms either, but he ignored the top two and went for the third.

"I listen to your heart," he said placidly, leaning even closer that his lower lip almost touched the shell of Suzaku's ear. "And thus it has spoken, never to leave you alone until I'm absolutely sure that I can."

Suzaku made a sound that might be the illegitimate offspring of a snort and a sob. Gino pulled him closer and rested his cheek on the soft mass of brown hair, smiling when he felt tension draining from the boy in his arms. This was familiar, he idly reflected. He didn't exactly remember when tense had become resigned and resigned had developed into relaxed, but days of trying to surprise the younger knight from behind had built many small bridges between these phases. And suddenly those little attempts had morphed into habit and he no longer needed a reason to wrap his arms around Suzaku.

This was one of the rare moments when he _did_ have a reason and Gino was all too ready to oblige, even more so when he felt those thin shoulders shook.

"You're too close."

He blinked, his mind slowly processing the sentence until every single letter boiled down to a suggestion that he should withdraw his arms. Something in Suzaku's voice made him unsure, but while he hesitated, the younger knight had wormed his way out of his loosened confines.

"You're too close," Suzaku repeated, the quieter echo almost inaudible between rustles of sheets as he rose to a sitting position. Gino had a hunch that it wasn't about physical proximity anymore, but kept the opinion to himself. The tension was back in Suzaku's posture, little thorns that made him flinch at the slightest touch. His eyes were dry, hardened to the brink of dullness, but his lips were smeared with red, teeth marks etched deep on the bleeding flesh.

It must be a cue, or some sort of hint for him to take immediate action. Gino felt confident when he leant up and kissed Suzaku fully on the mouth.

He felt considerably less confident when Suzaku kneed him in the stomach.

"You asked for it," the younger knight hissed even as his hands reached up to support Gino who was doubling over in pain. "What do you think you were–"

"You asked for it," he accused in return and raised his head to glare at Suzaku, tears still blurring his sight. "Or at least your lips did."

Suzaku looked like he was about to unleash a swift and bloody murder. Gino quickly backtracked in fear for his life. "Okay, so your lips are off-limits. You should have just told me from the beginning so I don't have to–"

"_Gino_," the warning cut him off and its tone was enough to shut him up for good, "stop talking for a minute."

The silence came as requested, complete with a cold weight that could solidify the entire Area 11 into ice. Gino would have tried to say something else – an excuse, an apology, or even an offended sort of announcement that he was not to be ordered around – if Suzaku hadn't suddenly slumped against the wall. His eyes were scrunched up tight and he was breathing deeply, long, measured beats tightly reined by control. Something must have happened, the thought swam into focus as Gino unconsciously rubbed his abused stomach. They were in Japan after all, and it was where his princess had died, killed by a terrorist who had just recently made another glorious entrance into the world.

"Did you see him?"

Gino snapped back to the present and fumbled around for any sort of comprehension to the question. "That bait for C.C.? Yes, of course. Skinny, with black hair, right?"

A thin laugh escaped Suzaku's lips. "Bait? He isn't a _bait_. He's…" A pause, or a loss of words. Somewhere in between, Gino realized that Suzaku wouldn't pick up that sentence and fill in the blank.

"Your friend?" he ventured a guess and almost flinched when the other knight pinned him with a glare so sharp that he could practically feel it stabbing his simple bravado. "I saw you talking to him earlier," he hastily added, half-wondering what he had said which merited that kind of reaction.

"Friend," Suzaku murmured, but it wasn't resign that echoed in his voice. "Yes, he was a friend. A friend who…"

Another pause. Gino waited. He could offer a string of guesses – _who betrayed him, who broke his heart, who used to be a very good friend before turning into an archenemy_ – and myriads of other stupider guesses, but something held him back. The look on Suzaku's face perhaps. Whatever it was–

The first thud widened his eyes into saucers. The second froze every muscle in his body, but the third spurred him into action. Gino had never been more grateful when reflexes honed over the years overrode his surprise and he reached behind Suzaku's head. His left palm, now serving as a cushion, wrapped itself firmly around and inside mass of brown hair to soften the collision, his knuckles driving painfully into the wall with each impact. Suzaku looked like he hardly registered anything but the fact that he was repeatedly hitting the back of his head onto the wall.

"Suzaku, stop it!" Half-drowned in a furious daze generated by panic, Gino heard his own voice shouting, felt his other hand shaking the younger boy's shoulder violently. A flash of green, and wild eyes were focusing on him, on the proximity between them which Gino was too overwrought to care at the moment. "What the hell are you–"

The rest of his words found home in Suzaku's mouth. Gino was too shocked to react in any way when the other knight used his full weight to push him down to the bed, never letting go of his lips even during the fall. There was something desperate, almost feral in the way he kissed and Gino had a split of a second to reflect on the irony before the realization of what was happening blindsided him full force.

It mostly had to do with how impatient fingers were ghosting over his unexplainably naked chest.

"Wait!" he tried to pull away and push the boy off him at the same time. "Suzaku, wait a min–"

"Shut up." It was a snarl and Suzaku's fingers were curling around the base of his throat, beautiful intense eyes narrowed to slits. "Shut up, shut up, _shut__ up_."

And suddenly it wasn't panic anymore. It certainly wasn't fear either, unless in some distant corner of the earth there existed a fear which could mesmerize someone so utterly like this, until his mind went horribly blank and there wasn't a scrap of _care _within him that he had stiff fingers hovering at the edge of breaking his neck. Purely guided by instinct, Gino reached up and clasped Suzaku's face with both hands.

"Look at me," he demanded, voice vibrating low in his throat beneath the lethal coil of fingers. "Not like this. Never like this, do you hear me?"

There was a sharp intake of breath and the moment dissolved into something clearer. A tingling sense of life. Suzaku now looked at him, not some undead ghost in his mind, and Gino mentally braced himself for what was coming.

"You want me," the younger boy accused, his voice wrought by too many things at once that it could only fall blunt on the deafening silence. Gino felt himself frowning in response.

"Not like this," he said, determined to drive his point home. "You don't deserve it. Neither of us does."

Suzaku didn't answer, silence spanning across more than just the distance between them, or the length of his arms as he continued to hold Suzaku's face. It felt like hours before those stiff fingers fell from his neck, leaving marks deeper than skin could testify, and it felt even longer before he could find his voice and produce a decent word.

"You know–"

"I'm sorry," the whisper left Suzaku's mouth in a rush, voice so thick with unshed tears that Gino had to blink a few times before he could fully comprehend what it was all about.

And of course he had to disagree.

"I started it," he pointed out, remembering the kick to his stomach. The other looked like he was going to argue, but Gino took advantage of their position to pull Suzaku down to curl on top of him. He half-expected another kick, but none came, no protest whatsoever even in its mildest form. A few lingering breaths, a few awkward moments and the tension melted, the knot unraveled, and Gino smiled, silently reveling on the way the younger boy yield, slowly, muscles shifting one by one until each found its place comfortably on the cradle that was his chest.

This was unfamiliar, he vaguely reflected. And felt different. Suzaku was different back and front. His shoulders were strong, as strong as Atlas, and there was nothing but firm rigidity in his back. Like he was ready to support the entire world if he had to. Gino respected that, but here, like this, he could feel Suzaku's heart beating wildly against his chest, a proof, more than anything, that he wasn't impervious to mortal weaknesses, not when the hands normally used to shove him away were now clutching his shoulders like there was nothing else more precious in the world

Different. Two sides of the same coin. The way he laughed with his friends but scowled at him. The way he let others get close to his person but allowed no one else but Gino to hold him like this.

It was almost flattering in a sense – a privilege, and Gino felt really, immensely proud at that.

"Why not?"

"Why not what?" he responded absentmindedly, too caught up in his personal contemplation to make sense of the question.

"Why not like this?"

And here he was thinking that they were already past that point and ready to move on. Gino sighed, wishing that he had a real hammer to pound common sense into the boy's head. "You heard me the first time," he answered, a hint of steel in his voice. "You don't deserve it. It's like selling your body just for one night."

A quiet exhale of breath, and then an even quieter voice, "It's just a body."

He felt his jaw clench. "Then you have to sell it to someone else."

A stiff silence. Gino watched ruefully as the castle he had built oh-so-carefully in the last few minutes crumbled into dust. Things like this took patience, he told himself. Trust wasn't a bridge built overnight. Some people took longer, and Suzaku was…

…Suzaku was…

He heaved a deep breath and held the boy in his arms tighter. "You're a knight," he said at last, keeping his voice as steady as possible. "This isn't something you do."

And there was that laugh again – Gino couldn't help but wonder if he would really hear a more genuine sound coming from Suzaku somewhere in the future. "I already sold my–"

"Don't." Quick. Instinctive. He savoured the aftertaste of the word, and the pregnant silence it left behind with something close to dread, and then hastily added, "Think happy thoughts. Me with a tutu."

Suzaku snorted, the closest to real laugh he had ever gotten so far. Gino contented himself with it, concentrating on the pattern of quiet breaths tickling the base of his neck, on other nonsense like how Suzaku fit so perfectly in his arms, or how it felt so undeniably right to hold him like this. Patience was all he needed. Slow steps, one foot in front of the other, pace after pace. After all, he had all the time in the world.

The scratching noise jolted him out of his profound reflection. He instinctively tightened his hold and glanced at the door warily. He wasn't thinking about ghost stories, not at all, but that noise…

"It's Arthur," Suzaku muttered from the curve of his neck, followed by a few seconds of static silence.

And then Gino burst into laughter.

"He wants his master back," he managed to surmise between bouts of laughter. "Should we open the door?"

"Yes," the other boy rose with a sigh, breaking free from his arms and causing Gino to pout. So Suzaku still chose Arthur over him. _Fine_. Not that he would fight with a feline anyway – even if said feline was now comfortably cradled in the crook of Suzaku's arm. And he wasn't jealous. There was no way that he would sink so low…

But it wasn't until Suzaku had sat down on the bed again, Arthur lazily baring fangs at him, that Gino realized that he had really accomplished something. Because no matter how he looked at it, the most important thing was still Suzaku, his posture completely different to the boy who had lay alone in his bed as his demons stared down at him from the disturbingly white wall.

It was that little thing – no more, no less.

"Do you want me to stay?" he asked softly, and was rewarded with a flash of something which might have been gratitude.

"No," Suzaku shook his head slowly. "I'll be all right."

Gino tried to tell himself that he wasn't disappointed. "Okay, I'll see you tomorrow then," he rose from the bed and kissed Suzaku lightly on the lips, and was only a little surprised when the other boy didn't pull away. Or knee him in the stomach again. In short, there was nothing he could do to keep that grin off his face.

At least something had improved, one problem solved.

Although another had clearly arisen, when Arthur sank razor-sharp teeth into his hand.

**_End_**

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